
A roundup of 2020 news not entirely centered around COVID
BY HAZEL SHAHGHOLI
The 2020 belonged to COVID-19
in mind, body, spirit and news.
But other events of note occurred
too. Here are a few:
Presidential impeachment
trial kicks off messy year.
The outcome of the impeachment
of President Donald Trump
was all but certain, but it went on
anyway. This event further infl
amed the volcanic bipartisan
rift that scorched a year during
which the country needed unity
to get beyond the medical crisis
that later developed. Instead,
strict loyalty to Trump from the
GOP was the overriding takeaway.
Fifty-two of the 53 Republican
senators voted to acquit
Trump, with Utah Senator Mitt
Romney being the lone dissenter.
Financial crash.
COVID-19 did more than just
kill millions of people globally.
Although not as important as
this enormous loss of life, fi nancial
markets took a brutal beating
from the pandemic — one that
might take years to recover from.
Dubbed the Coronavirus Crash,
Wall Street reported bleak numbers:
S&P 500, Dow Jones and
Nasdaq slumped 35%, 38% and
30% respectively. This fi nancial
devastation was the fastest major
stock market fall in fi nancial history,
and one of 2020’s bitter moments
given the positive trends of
January and February. As a point
of comparison, the record quarterly
drop for Wall Street was 40%
in 1932, during the Great Depression.
With contributing reporting
from Reuters.
Ghislaine Maxwell,
fi nally arrested.
Was British socialite Ghislaine
Maxwell a pawn in procuring
underage girls to be sexually
abused and traffi cked by pedophile
Jeffrey Epstein? We won’t
know the verdict on that until
2021, and Maxwell continues to
proclaim her innocence. But we
do know that she is being held
in a New York City jail pending
trial, had an appeal to block a presumably
incriminating 2016 testimony
from being used in her trial
thrown out — on the grounds that
“bad publicity” would prevent a
fair trial — and is currently attempting
to buy her way out of jail
with a $28.5 million bail package.
Life on mars remains subject
to speculation. But hey, there’s
water on the moon!
Theorizing of the existence
of water on the moon began in
the 90s and became increasingly
more promising after a 2009
NASA mission. Unlike the majority
of 2020, the presence of an
abundance of water on the moon
is certain, after robust evidence
of the H20 chemical signature
was confi rmed by NASA scientists.
Although a vacation as far
away from planet Earth as possible
sounds pretty dreamy right
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now, this discovery is magnanimous
in terms of future lunar
missions that will be made easier
with astronauts able to drink instead
of lug water to the planet,
and also utilize it to create rocket
propellant. The water seems to
be stored in the planet’s many
craters and given that the temperature
inside of these craters
is rarely above -230 degrees centigrade;
missions to the moon for
drilling are already being fl oated.
Turns out Elon Musk may have
been poking around on the wrong
planet. That, or he’s just a really
committed David Bowie fan.
Those tax returns.
For years, President Trump
angled himself as a successful,
millionaire businessman who
knew how to make money work.
But then the bomb dropped in
September 2020 when a New York
Times expose into his secretive
tax returns revealed Trump had
paid just $750 in personal income
taxes during his fi rst year in offi ce
Demonstrators protest in response to President Donald Trump’s refusal
to make his tax returns public in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. April 15,
2017. REUTERS/Mark Makela
as president, and the same measly
fi gure the year prior. Adding insult
to injury he paid no taxes at
all in 10 of the 15 previous years.
Arguments were slung back and
forth. Trump had “prepaid millions
of dollars” in federal tax returns
and the report was essentially
mud-slinging by what he
decried as the #FakeNewsMedia
who picked only the most damming
aspects of the records, hellbent
on preventing him obtaining
a second term in offi ce.
The Harvey
Weinstein trial.
Hobbling into court on a tennis
ball-modifi ed walker, Harvey
Weinstein — the disgraced Hollywood
fi lm mogul — faced justice
for years of sexually abusing
women. Jurors didn’t feel
any remorse for Weinstein after
hearing weeks of emotional testimony
from victims who were
for a long time too afraid to come
forth against him, but fi nally
did so due to the bravery of Rose
McGowan and the #MeToo movement.
Judge James Burke handed
down a three-year sentence to
Weinstein for the third-degree
rape of a woman who wishes to
remain anonymous and a 20-year
sentence for a fi rst-degree criminal
sex act on a production assistant
in 2006. Judge Burke ordered
the sentences be served consecutively,
and a 23-year sentence fora
69-year-old serial sex-offender is
something, at least.
Bushfi res ravage
Australia.
Even before the onset of the
pandemic, conditions in many
parts of Australia were near
apocalyptic. Although bushfi res
occur during the Australia summer
due to its hot, dry climate,
nobody had ever seen a level of
devastation the likes of which ravaged
the country in early January
2020. More than 16 acres when up
in fl ames, resulting losses of life,
devastation of wildlife habits and
the destruction of homes—particularly
in the regions of New
South Wales and Victoria, fi lling
the skies of the city of Melbourne
with heavy clouds of smoke.
Many point to climate change as
a reason for such environmental
catastrophes.
Film producer Harvey Weinstein arrives at New York Criminal Court for
his sexual assault trial in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New
York, U.S., January 9, 2020. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo
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